And I see your sadness
Is it just like mine?
We spend much of life rehearsing permanence. Calendars extend months ahead, plans multiply, and ordinary chores encourage the soothing fiction that tomorrow is already ours. Mortality remains manageable as long as it stays abstract, assigned to strangers or some distant version of ourselves. Grief breaks that arrangement. One absence can make every future date feel provisional, exposing distraction as one of the mind’s most useful shelters.
“As We Dance With Tears in The Rain” — Death Drifts Under the Skin in Traitrs Video for “I Was Ill, You Were Wrong”
That shelter is nearly universal. Work, desire, entertainment, ambition, and the small obligations of the day let us function while the knowledge of an ending waits at the edge of thought. When that knowledge presses forward, it carries a second fear with it: the possibility of losing every person, object, memory, and role through which we understand ourselves. Continuing to move after facing that fact can become its own form of courage.
Toronto coldwave act TRAITRS confronts that contradiction in the new video for “I Was Ill, You Were Wrong,” released last November and later included on the band’s album POSSESSOR; the song begins with private anguish before reaching toward the possibility that another person’s grief may resemble our own.
“I Was Ill, You Were Wrong is challenging The Psychology of Ignoring Death.”
The recording begins beneath low, echoing synths, its measured dirge already gathering force. A disciplined drumbeat dances in the face of death, pulling the song forward as the guitars climb through serrated sweeps, widening melodies, and mounting sheets of effects. Shawn Tucker’s voice carries the cracked theatricality associated with Robert Smith and Brett Anderson while retaining its own bruised register, rising from a controlled ache toward the sound of a heart crying out against erasure. Each confession lands like a brick dropped onto a bare floor. The verses catalogue bodily harm through blunt images of starvation, wires, poison, and a fatal fall; the chorus turns outward, searching another person’s face for the same sorrow. There is a curious reversal within the arrangement: as the dirge-like synths grow heavier, the song seems to quicken, converting dread into momentum. Midway through, an organ-like phrase drives the track into a broader ascent before cascading vocals and guitars accumulate into a dense wall of sound, carrying the music to its greatest height precisely where the subject closes in on extinction.
When the single first appeared, Tucker described the shared recognition at its center:
“I felt that song connected me to everything and everyone, it is the one thing we all share and have in common,” Tucker said. “It is also a wake up call to live the life you want to live. We only have one chance at this so go dance in the rain.”
Directed by Tucker and filmed in severe black and white, the video places Emmanuelle Vaughan inside a space without visible walls, floor, or horizon. She first appears at a distance beneath a narrow overhead light, nearly motionless, before the camera moves close to her collarbone, spine, hands, and face. An oil-dark coating begins to spread across her fingers, arms, back, and throat as her gestures become more expansive. Between these passages, Tucker performs at the microphone and guitar through smoke, coarse grain, and bands of video interference. Vaughan keeps dancing while her body is gradually claimed by the surrounding black, until the final movements yield to an empty frame.
Tucker explains:
“I find myself personally active in ignoring mortality. It’s inescapable and we use distraction as defence against it.
We all crave purpose and everyday distractions. This is a psychological defense mechanism keeping our deepest fears at bay. Our fight for survival.
Death has a way of playing with us, bringing up this deep sense of isolation and failure that we are all constantly running away from.
Most people find the concept of being completely alone terrifying and painful. It’s stealing our tomorrows, it steals away everything.
This album is incredibly personal for me because I’m still trying to make sense of a major loss in my own life. When I directed this, the goal was to visualize death as this unstoppable force—almost like a terminal illness creeping through the body. It doesn’t care who you are; it just destroys. But I didn’t want the video to just be bleak. It’s about our internal fight. I had wrapped the ‘Burn In Heaven’ video up a few months prior and was thinking about casting for I Was Ill and wanted to work with Emma again on this project as the lead and push her in a completely different approach. I also knew Emma knows exactly what I was looking for, and expected of her.
In the video, she is aware death has come, but she still chooses to dance, finding this beautiful defiance right up until the black void completely takes over.
It was all shot in one day on location in a small studio warehouse in Hamilton, Ontario, that took 7 hours.”
The visual idea draws from Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, particularly its limitless black chamber, where space loses every familiar coordinate and solitude becomes physical. Here, the setting turns mortality into an encroaching presence that can be seen on the body. Vaughan understands what has entered the room, yet her dance continues for as long as movement remains possible.
“The void represented Ultimate Isolation perfectly and supports my visual theme of total isolation. There are no walls, no horizons, and no exit. The victims are entirely alone with their desires right before they are destroyed.”
Tucker reduces the premise to one plain sentence: “None of us are getting out of here alive.” Within the song and video, that certainty becomes a reason to recognize another person’s sadness, inhabit the present, and dance while the body still answers.
Watch the video for “I Was Ill, You Were Wrong” below:
Formed in Toronto in 2015, TRAITRS began as a recording project before sessions with producer Josh Korody led to the 2016 debut Rites and Ritual. Butcher’s Coin followed in 2018, expanding the band’s audience across North America and Europe, while 2021’s Horses in the Abattoir brought another set of propulsive rhythms, angular guitars, and horror-informed electronics. Years of touring have carried TRAITRS through more than a dozen countries, including appearances at Wave-Gotik-Treffen, Castle Party, and Canadian Music Week, as well as shows with VNV Nation, Lebanon Hanover, She Past Away, Twin Tribes, and Ultra Sunn.
POSSESSOR, released March 13, 2026, brings the band’s preoccupation with grief, alienation, and mortality into its most personal form to date. Recorded at Toronto’s Wychwood Studios with Josh Korody and mastered by Matt Colton, the album is available to stream here and order through Bandcamp here.
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